Author: Melech Maglasang

This past semester I was awarded a grant by Davidson College and the Freeman Foundation to allow me to get an internship in East Asia.  My parents insisted that I should go to the Philippines because it was familiar territory and I would know how to navigate the culture.  Securing an internship was not even that much of a problem since my family knew some people within the information technology industry and I was almost guaranteed a position in this communication company, but I chose not to go to the…

With the Sex Positivity fair coming up at Davidson College, a random factoid came up about Asian women being one of the most desired by most people, while Asian males were seen as less desirable.  I did a little digging to see if there were any peer reviewed articles on the subject. I didn’t look too hard but, there were none. If you do a quick google right now you’ll see a bunch of unofficial articles discussing the subject with some form of “data” but there really was no concrete literature…

The day was December 25th, my father, my sister, and I just landed from a 24+ hour journey at Miami International Airport.  Stereotypes of America reinforced by the prominence of western television raced through all of our minds. I even thought it would be snowing since that was what happened when it was Christmas in the United States.  We were walking through the airport and the people I saw there surprised me.  In my head I was expecting to see white people with blonde hair and blue eyes bustling about…

This past weekend members of ACAA and I attended ECAASU 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina.  To say the least, it was a wonderful experience to be surrounded by Asians, Asian-Americans, and scholarly figures that shared my experiences concerning culture, race, and growing up as an immigrant in the United States. What I want to focus on, however, is the phenomena of self-discovery.  I discovered that I am what is known as the “1.5 Generation.”  It is the demographic of children that immigrated to a new country between the ages of…

The idea of identity is, to me, a very personal one.  Our experiences, characteristics, and biographies go hand in hand to make us unique.  We live our lives, crafting “who we are” consciously and unconsciously.  Within my life as a Filipino living within the United States, I have always considered myself Filipino at heart.  I was born, bred, and baptized in the Philippines and no amount of cultural assimilation was going to take that away.  Some older Filipinos may disagree however, since I am more “Americanized.”  For instance, I respond…